When you interview a famous German - like Michael Schumacher, say - try not to
let him see that you've added a Hitler moustache to his photograph, advises
Nigel Farndale.

Four police officers are said to have visited the hamlet of Pitcombe, Somerset - population 20 - after a poster of a Conservative councillor had a Hitler moustache drawn on it. Neither the police, nor the humourless councillor who reported the incident, come out particularly well. But what about the villain with the felt-tip?

I find it hard to condemn his criminal act, mainly because I have committed it many times, dating back to when I was about five and was first left alone with a pen and a newspaper, full of photographs of people crying out to be giving Hitler moustaches. I couldn’t help it then and I can’t help it now.

True, there is a perfectly respectable alternative, which is to draw a pair of glasses, but what if the face already has glasses? What if it is Chris Evans, or Michael Caine? You have to go with a Hitler, or at the very least a walrus.

If the Pitcombe Poster Defacer is apprehended, he might consider mentioning that Prince Charles’s favourite goon, Spike Milligan, once drew a Hitler moustache and side parting on his own photograph for the cover of Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall. And that the cartoonist Nicholas Garland once depicted Nick Ridley drawing these accessories on a picture of Helmut Kohl for the cover of The Spectator, which contributed to the minister’s resignation.

Also, he might mention that the comedian Richard Herring recently spent a year sporting a Hitler moustache, in the hope that he could reclaim it for comedy. He failed, miserably: people just thought him weird, and he tired of explaining that he wasn’t a deranged neo-Nazi, but a comedian trying to prove an esoteric point. It did, though, give him the opportunity to describe Charlie Chaplin and Hitler as “contemporaries whose careers, it’s fair to say, dropped off after the Second World War”.

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I think Herring was on to something, because there are few faces that can’t be rendered more amusing by these two little additions, especially if the person has a bland face, like David Cameron, or a serious face, like Andrew Marr. He looks hilarious with one. Go on, try it.

The only context in which the addition of a Hitler moustache is inappropriate is when the subject is German. This, as I discovered, causes embarrassment not only to the drawer but also to the drawee – especially if the drawee happens to be Michael Schumacher. I was flying to Italy to interview him, reading through a pile of cuttings and marking out interesting passages with my black pen. As I contemplated a close-up photograph of Formula One’s finest, my thoughts wandered; before I knew it I had drawn a Hitler moustache and side parting on it.

I got on with my research, putting the defaced photograph out of sight at the back of the cuttings and out of my mind. The next day I was sitting on Michael Schumacher’s sofa, the cuttings by my side as I mulled over what questions I would ask. Schumacher entered with his glamorous German press officer, Sabine. They sat down on the sofa with me. When Sabine saw the cuttings, she asked if they were the latest about Michael from the British press. “Can I take a look?”

Sure, I said. She flicked through them, with Michael looking over her shoulder. Then they both froze. And when I saw what they were looking at, I froze too. No comments were made, but I couldn’t help feeling I had set Anglo-German relations back by about 70 years.